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Amazon lands in Australia

Amazon's worst kept secret is no more. The retail and internet giant has finally admitted to opening a data centre in Sydney with a post on the Amazon Web Services blog.

The post said the cloud computing company, owned by etailing mammoth Amazon.com had just added an "edge location in Sydney, Australia", its 33rd.

The location will be used for AmazonCloudFront, a web hosting service, and Amazon Route 53, a domain name system (DNS) hosting service that connects to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), one of the company's main cloud services. It is independent of Amazon.com's online retailing arm, which sells books, videos, electronics and other items.

Cloud computing refers to computer resources that can be turned on or off and scaled up or down, depending on demand. It is increasingly used by businesses to supplement or replace their on-site computing facilities.

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The company said "edge locations" help lower latency and improve performance for end users. They allow data to be stored temporarily to reduce download times. Eight new edge locations have been launched this year.

In the post, the company said it was answering "frequent requests" by customers in Australia for local services and would provide pay-as-you-go services.

"Based on customer requests, internal logging, and the response to our recent survey, we believe that this location will prove to be of great benefit to our customers, providing them with increased performance and reduced latency. We believe that CloudFront's pay-as-you-go pricing model will provide Australian companies and global companies with a very cost-effective alternative to traditional content delivery solutions."

Rumours of an Australian Amazon data centre have circulated for a year, since a report appeared in The Australian in July 2011, but the company has refused to talk about it, preferring instead to try to feed journalists with positive client case studies in preparation for a launch.

In November, iTNews revealed the company was advertising for a data centre operations manager based in Sydney. The Australian Financial Review reported at least 12 staff had already been hired by January.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that, in accounts previously lodged with the corporate regulator, Amazon Corporate Services said the company had "commenced conducting business in the form of the provision of marketing and other corporate services for and on behalf of an associated company, Amazon Web Services LLC" during the year to June 30, 2011.

The actual location of the facility was not revealed in this week's announcement, but it has been known that AWS has been scouting for facilities in Sydney for months.

Amazon's chief technology, Dr Werner Vogels, was in Sydney last month but refused to talk about the company's local plans.

Australia is awash with data centre activity at the moment. HP opened a $200 million facility - Aurora - in Sydney's Eastern Creek last week, while NextDC - a data centre landlord - is officially opening its first Melbourne facility on July 4. It already operates one in Brisbane and is building others in Canberra, Perth and Sydney. Macquarie Telecom, which provides managed hosting and cloud services, is opening a $60 million facility - Intellicentre 2, in Sydney's North Ryde, next month.

While an "edge location" may not be a fully-fledged data centre, it may be seen by the market as an Amazon offering towards a more comprehensive local service that may satisfy some clients' need for keeping data onshore.

Australian-based clients already using the company's CloudFront and Route 53 services offshore will not need to change anything. The company said their requests would automatically be routed to the new location where appropriate.

76 comments

who else clicked this article hoping it would be about an amazon fulfillment warehouse :(

Commenter

nyc863

Date and time

June 21, 2012, 4:22PM

Me

Commenter

DMH

Location

Sydney

Date and time

June 21, 2012, 4:26PM

Yep

Commenter

Mego

Date and time

June 21, 2012, 4:27PM

Me, I did. Though my last delivery from the US didn't take very long at all.

Commenter

kia

Location

sydney

Date and time

June 21, 2012, 4:27PM

Oh what misleading! booo, cloud computing is not that great, esp the upload speeds Australians have.

Commenter

Victor

Date and time

June 21, 2012, 4:29PM

Me.

Commenter

Luigi

Location

Melbourne

Date and time

June 21, 2012, 4:33PM

Me!

Commenter

johnsmith1000

Date and time

June 21, 2012, 4:33PM

Yep, I got suckered in as well!

Commenter

RoyHobbs

Location

PartsUnknown

Date and time

June 21, 2012, 4:37PM

Me. Although good to know they're providing cloud services in this country too.

Commenter

c1ee

Date and time

June 21, 2012, 4:39PM

ME! SMH headlines alot of the time are deliberately misleading dont you think?

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